Date: Tue, 30 Dec 1997 09:20:02 -0600 (CST) From: Dennis Grammenos <dgrammen-AT-prairienet.org> Subject: M-I: Conelius Castoriades Dies at 75 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 27 Dec 1997 13:45:03 -0500 From: davidc <110031.126-AT-compuserve.com> To: thesis11 <thesis11-AT-Sociology.resfss.latrobe.edu.au> Subject: Death of Cornelius Castoriadis Dear Friends, Colleagues: Please excuse, again, the impersonal nature of this letter, which I am sending to you bcc: Cornelius Castoriadis died last evening, December 26, of complications from heart bypass surgery in early October. He put up a valiant fight until the end. I am including in this e-missive, as a text file, the draft of an obituary I have written about him which I hope to have published. For those who are hearing this news for the first time and for those who have already heard of his illness and have inquired of me concerning his condition, I regret that it was not until now, after his death, that I could begin to inform you and to fill in the details. I was respecting the private wishes of his family. I am sure you understand. The man is gone but his work remains, unfinished yet rich with promise and full of tasks to be fulfilled and visions to be dreamed and achieved. With sorrow, David Ames Curtis ______________________________ Cornelius Castoriadis Dies at 75 Philosopher and Political Thinker Inspired May '68 Rebellion in France A major figure of the postwar political and intellectual world has made his final exit from a historical stage on which his thoughts and actions remained better known than his name. Cornelius Castoriadis, philosopher of the social imagination, co-founder of the legendary group and journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, seminal social and political thinker credited with inspiring the May 1968 events in France, professional economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, practicing psychoanalyst, distinguished Sovietologist, and critical conscience of the international Left died December 26 in Paris at age 75 of complications from heart surgery. He is survived by his wife Zoé, their daughter Cyb=E8le, and an elder daughter, Sparta. To avoid deportation from France, Castoriadis wrote under pseudonyms. Only in the 1970s did this man of Greek extraction gain French citizenship. He then began to publish under his own name so that student radicals moved by his ideas could discover who had inspired them. In the English-speaking world, many had not heard of him. Translations of his writings were circulated with a certain success during the sixties and seventies by Socialisme ou Barbarie's sister organization, London Solidarity. But books began to appear in English under his own name only during the past decade. Things began to change this year with the publication of a new book, World in Fragments, and a retrospective Castoriadis Reader, the paperback edition of his magnum opus The Imaginary Institution of Society, a special issue of the social theory journal Thesis Eleven, and the creation of a webpage: <http://aleph.lib.ohio-state.edu/~bcase/castoriadis>. Castoriadis avoided the intellectual fashions of his day. Such French trends as fellow-traveling, existentialism, structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, and postmodernism (the latter championed by former S. ou B. member Jean-Fran=E7ois Lyotard) were among the targets of his fierce and withering, yet often humorous, criticisms. Nor did he fit the mold of German critical theorists, from Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse to J=FCrgen Habermas, all notoriously weak in their criticism of "Soviet" Marxism. He thought for himself and with a small band of workers and intellectuals who refused to give in to fads or to countenance oppression of any sort. His journal helped lead the fight against the Algerian War, but Castoriadis never indulged in "Third World" rhetoric to protect "left-wing" dictators. This steadfast, clear-eyed independence won him and his group admiration and helped to build a non- Communist Left in postwar France. Though critical of himself as well as others, Castoriadis never renounced his belief that ordinary people can run their lives and institute self-governance without bosses, managers, professional politicians, "leading parties," priests, experts, therapists, or gurus. There was no "God that failed," for there was no God, no Reason of History, to save people from self-created folly, or tragedy. Castoriadis was born March 11, 1922, in Constantinople. His family expatriated a few months later to avoid strife surrounding the birth of the Turkish State. He grew up in a prewar Athens marked by dictatorship, world war, occupation, and liberation. A member of the Greek Communist Youth at fifteen, he soon formed an opposition group. In the extremely polarized atmosphere of wartime Greece, most members returned to the CP's ranks. Castoriadis joined the most left-wing Greek Trotskyist faction, a decision that placed him under threat of death from both fascists and communists. The defining political moment of Castoriadis's adult life occurred in December 1944, when the Greek CP attempted a coup d'état. Even fellow Trotskyists, hoping the event would drive the CP leftward, thought it presaged revolutionary changes. Castoriadis disputed their optimism. With a prescience that would become characteristic, he predicted that the putsch, if successful, would result not in the revolutionary creation of a classless society but in the installation of a regime similar to Russia's. What ultimately determined the course of events was the presence of British troops in Athens. But the subsequent establishment of totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe and the rest of the Balkansincluding Yugoslavia, which was not "liberated" by the Red Armyamply confirmed this prognosis. Castoriadis escaped what soon turned into the bloody Greek Civil War when he received a French scholarship. He left Piraeus in December 1945 on a ship, since become famous, that brought a generation of Greek intellectuals, including Kostas Axelos and Kostas Papaioannou, to France. In Paris he joined the Trotskyists and began to develop the consequences of his left-wing anti-Stalinism. Years before ousted Yugoslavian CP leader Milovan Djilas became famous for characterizing Communist bosses as a "new class," Castoriadis analyzed "bureaucratic capitalism" East and West. He distinguished a "fragmented" form in the Westwhere, in the wake of the Depression, the New Deal, war, and the rise of a welfare State, a stratum of state and private managers, accompanied by the bosses of business unionism, began replacing private owners of capital as principal director of production and the economy and main antagonist of workersfrom a "total and totalitarian" form reaching demented heights of terror under Stalin's regime of apparatchiks. The first to translate Max Weber into Greek, Castoriadis was aided in this original, if highly unorthodox, extension of Marxian theory by this sociologist's writings on bureaucracy. It was on the question of the Trotskyists' "unconditional defense of the USSR" that Castoriadis first opposed the Fourth International. In 1948, French Trotskyists proposed an alliance with Tito's police State, then on the outs with Stalin's Cominform. Socialisme ou Barbarie, the group he formed with like-minded internal opposition forces, transformed itself into a separate organization. Around that time, Detroit radicals centered around Raya Dunayevskya (Leon Trotsky's secretary in Mexico), C. L. R. James (the Trinidad-born Pan-Africanist, literary critic, cricket writer, and Trotsky's interlocutor on the "Negro Question" in his adopted America), and Grace Lee Boggs (a Chinese-American woman who had studied philosophy in prewar France) broke with American Trotskyism and co-operated with S. ou B. during the 1950s. What distinguished S. ou B. from many other revolutionary groups was its idea that socialism meant not rule by a leading party versed in Marxist theory but "workers' management" of production and society. In S. ou B.'s first issue (March 1949), Castoriadis predicted that the working-class response to Stalin's takeover of East Europe would be a revolt against its new bureaucracy. Workers' councils set up during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution strikingly confirmed his prediction even as this workers' revolt against "Communism" threw the rest of the Left into disarray. Along with S. ou B.'s cofounder Claude Lefort, Castoriadis and his review challenged the fellow- traveling of such prominent French intellectuals as Jean-Paul Sartre. (Lefort had studied with French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who eventually resigned as political editor of Sartre's journal, Les Temps Modernes.) Sartre was later heard to say, "Castoriadis was right, but at the wrong time." Castoriadis quipped that Sartre had the honor of being wrong at the right time. Developing his idea of "bureaucratic capitalism," Castoriadis asserted that the main class opposition had become that between "executants," or "order-takers," and "directors," or "order-givers." What distinguishes capitalismespecially in its bureaucratic stage of giant factories, huge geographically-dispersed corporations, and complex technical apparatusesfrom earlier class societies based on slavery or feudalism is that workers now keep the system operating not by obeying orders (slave revolts or Jacqueries serving as counterexamples from previous societies) but by resisting and contravening the irrational and often absurd orders given by a class of managers cut off from the everyday reality of production (the sure proof being the devastating effect of "working to rule"). This resistance, expressed initially in cooperation among "informal groups" at work, also encourages a tendency toward autonomous action that can serve as a basis for the transformation of society. With a managerial bureaucracy in state- run enterprises, private businesses, and top-down unions replacing capital ownership as the distinguishing feature of capitalism, those who perform the tasks of production have to be encouraged to participate and to show initiative. At the same time, management finds it must combat independent decision-making on their part. Out of the experience of the Hungarian Revolution Castoriadis composed his classic statement of how a self- managed society might work. Still today, "On the Content of Socialism" serves as a reference point for libertarian socialists. But the uncontested ascension of De Gaulle in 1958 brought another phenomenon to his attention. For S. ou B., Gaullism represented modernization for France, not incipient fascism. With the collapse of the revolutionary movement and the advent of "modern capitalism," bureaucracy both encourages and feeds upon mass privatization and depoliticization of the populace. Apathy becomes the norm when people's drive for participation is systematically thwarted. Yet by the very early sixties Castoriadis also noticed countervailing trends. Before many others, he recognized that the shop stewards' movement in England, the nascent youth, women's, and antiwar movements, and the struggles of racial and cultural minorities offered prospects for revolt against modern society that might give rise to prospects for revolt against modern society that might give rise to unpredictable and unprecedented expressions of autonomy, alternative ways of living. The logical conclusion of Russian Communism's bankruptcy and the rise of modern capitalismwith its simultaneous encouragement and exclusion of people's participation and the resulting new forms of contestationwas that Marxism itself had become a deadening ideology of oppression, out of touch with new movements and aspirations for change. In the final issues of S. ou B., Castoriadis posed the new alternative in stark terms: one had to decide between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionary. He chose the latter option. In "Marxism and Revolutionary Theory" (1964-5), he challenged structuralist as well as functionalist explanations of society and history while Paris was still in the midst of a Livi-Strauss-Althusser-Foucault structuralist craze. In 1967 S. ou B. disbanded. But its key ideas continued to gain ground. The older brother of May 1968 student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had attended the group's meetings, and "Dany" himself proudly proclaimed his "plagiarism" of Castoriadis and S. ou B. Still a foreign national working for OECD and so prohibited from engaging in politics, Castoriadis maintained a low profile during the student-worker rebellion. But he and other S. ou B.-ers helped students turn May '68 into the largest strike France had ever known. Calls for "autogestion" (self-management) in universities and factories echoed his 1949 inaugural essay and appeals to the "power of the imagination" recalled his final S. ou B. text. Castoriadis spent the last thirty years of his life overseeing publication of his S. ou B. texts (Political and Social Writings in three volumes) and ceaselessly developing, out of his last S. ou B. essay, a highly original conception of history as imaginary creationirreducible to any preestablished plan, whether natural, rational, or divine. In Imaginary Institution and an ongoing collection of writings (translated as Crossroads in the Labyrinth, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, and World in Fragments), he elaborated his views without ever disavowing his original conception of "workers' management" and expanded that germ of an idea into a "project of autonomy" stretching from ancient Greece to the present day. Castoriadis retired from his OECD position as Director of Statistics, National Accounts, and Growth Studies in 1970, a job that had enabled him to study in depth the major developed capitalist economies. He became a practicing psychoanalyst in 1974 and was elected professor at Paris's Icole des Hautes Itudes en Sciences Sociales in 1979. As a psychoanalyst and in lectures and books, he developed a distinctive renewal of Freudian theory based on an original "psychical monad" that must be socialized by force and that never fully accepts the social individual into which it is fashioned. Dreams (overtly sexual or not), slips, "acting out," transgression, and even subversion testify to the persistence of this ineliminable asocial core of the psychewhich, when partially socialized, can serve as a source for imaginative social change. For Castoriadis, reports by Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and others concerning the "death of the subject" and the "death of man" were, like Mark Twain's death, "slightly exaggerated." With his wife at the time, Piera Aulagnier, Castoriadis challenged the reigning Lacanianism in French psychoanalytic circles, instigating a break with Lacan's "Third Group" in 1968. He opposed this rhetoric with the idea that psychoanalysislike pedagogy and politics, though in different waysaims at human autonomy. The goal of psychoanalysis is to establish "another relation" with one's unconscious, one characterized by lucid self-reflection and deliberation, a clearer recognition and acceptance of one's unconscious imaginary creations. The Freudian restatement of the ancient Greek injunction, "Know Thyself," received a powerful new articulation quite out of step with today's faddish therapeutic, drug-dependent, and antipsychoanalytic trends. Two key themes are worked out in his later writings. The first involves Castoriadis's rediscovery of the imagination. The imagination, Castoriadis found, unsettles the entire edifice of our "inherited philosophy." In On the Soul, Aristotle provided what became the standard view of the imagination, one marked by irreality, mimicry, an impotent negativity. Although apparently settling things there, Aristotle took up the phantasia again at the end of his treatise in a way that violated his canonical separation of sensation from intellection. Conversely, as twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger noticed, Immanuel Kant granted the "Transcendental Imagination" a central position in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) but then dislodged it a few years later in the second edition. Heidegger describes this turnaround as Kant's "recoil" from the consequences of a powerful and unbridled imagination. Curiously, Heidegger himself then dropped all mention of it. Castoriadis also observed that, while Sigmund Freud spoke of "phantasies" all the time, the founder of modern psychoanalysis refrained from naming, let alone examining, this strange power to bring the imaginary, the non-existent, into being. A second major theme is the "co-birth," in ancient Greece, of philosophy and politics. As the conscious questioning of society's instituted representations, philosophy develops hand in hand with politics, which Castoriadis described as society's lucid attempt to alter its institutions. Both are associated with the autonomy project, which Castoriadis saw as later expressed in early burgher challenges to Church and King, the American and French Revolutions, and workers', women's, and youth movements of Western societies, as well as in modern attempts to pursue philosophy beyond theological confines. Castoriadis devoted particular attention to the advent of citizen democracy in fifth-century B.C. Athens. He examined its direct-democratic institutions in order to contrast them with "representative" ones that establish permanent place-holders divorced from average citizens in today's "democracies." Castoriadis preferred the term liberal oligarchy to describe current Western political arrangements. Castoriadis never stopped working. He was to lecture in the United States against recent fads in psychoanalysis. "We have to keep trying," he wrote, "to spread across the Atlantic" that "plague" of self-knowledge Freud said he was bringing with him when he visited America. And Castoriadis had completed an article on "The Rationality' of Capitalism" shortly before the recent global market collapse. He wondered how far capitalism couldaccording to, but also against, its own "logic"go toward turning the world into a "planetary casino" of currency and finance speculation. Every few days, he noted, sums greater than the entire US GNP are electronically gambled worldwide via leveraged bets of no productive utility. Castoriadis's work will be remembered for its remarkable continuity and coherence as well as its extraordinary breadth. Autonomy appears as a key theme in his early postwar writings. Not until his death did he stop elaborating on its meaning, applications, ramifications, and limits for physics, biology, psychoanalysis, linguistics, society, politics, education, and philosophy. Death itself, it happens, was a recurring theme. We require an "ethic of mortality" to counter heteronomous promises of eternity. This ethic was an integral part of the Greek view that an afterlife, should such a thing exist, is worse than life on Earth. As a democratic institution, tragedya public performance of a play that ends in deathreminded the Athenians of the ultimate meaninglessness of one's thoughts and actions as well as of the need for self-limitation to keep hubris in check: The sole genuine limitation that democracy can bear is self-limitation, which in the last analysis can only be the task and the work of individuals (of citizens) educated through and for democracy. Such an education is impossible without acceptance of the fact that the institutions we give ourselves are neither absolutely necessary in their content nor totally contingent. This signifies that no meaning is given to us as a gift, any more than there is any guarantor or guarantee of meaning; it signifies that there is no other meaning than the one we create in and through history. And this amounts to saying that democracy, like philosophy, necessarily sets aside the sacred. In still other terms, democracy requires that human beings accept in their actual behavior what until now they almost never have truly wanted to accept (and what, in our utmost depths, we practically never accept), namely, that they are mortal. It is only starting from this unsurpassableand almost impossibleconviction of the mortality of each one of us and of all that we do, that people can live as autonomous beings, see in others autonomous beings, and render possible an autonomous society. In his work and in his life, Cornelius Castoriadis lived this democratic ethic of mortality until the very end. David Ames Curtis ______________________________________________________________ --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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